Ways with Words
Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms

This book, first published in 1983, traces language patterns and cultural differences between 'Roadville' and 'Tracton'.

Shirley Brice Heath (Author)

9780521273190, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 7 July 1983

450 pages, 18 b/w illus. 3 maps 17 tables
23 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.59 kg

' … captures the elusive nature of effective ethnography: involvement and empathy yield a sound and practical analysis.' Developments in Language Teaching

Ways with Words, first published in 1983, is a classic study of children learning to use language at home and at school in two communities only a few miles apart in the south-eastern United States. 'Roadville' is a white working-class community of families steeped for generations in the life of textile mills; 'Trackton' is an African-American working-class community whose older generations grew up farming the land, but whose existent members work in the mills. In tracing the children's language development the author shows the deep cultural differences between the two communities, whose ways with words differ as strikingly from each other as either does from the pattern of the townspeople, the 'mainstream' blacks and whites who hold power in the schools and workplaces of the region. Employing the combined skills of ethnographer, social historian, and teacher, the author raises fundamental questions about the nature of language development, the effects of literacy on oral language habits, and the sources of communication problems in schools and workplaces.

Photographs, maps, figures, tables, texts
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Note on transcriptions
Part I. Ethnographer Learning: 1. The piedmont: textile mills and times of change
2. 'Gettin' on' in two communities
3. Learning how to talk in Trackton
4. Teaching how to talk in Roadville
5. Oral traditions
6. Literate traditions
7. The townspeople
Part II. Ethnographer Doing: 8. Teachers as learners
9. Learners as ethnographers
Epilogue
Epilogue - 1996
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Sociolinguistics [CFB]